Sunday, January 13, 2008

Musee Mechanique II

The previous picture and this one are from a pinball/baseball game. A pinball pops out of the umpire (who is luckily standing just behind the pitcher's mound) and into the basket attached to the pitcher. The pitcher then flings the ball toward the player, who has uses a single pinball flipper "bat" to hit the ball into the field. It may be caught by one of the fielders, or may make it to the fence, where it scores a hit.

This game is one of two versions at the Musee Mechanique. They each list the names of the All-Stars you are supposedly playing against. This picture, then, is of a mini version of the Brooklyn Dodgers' Dazzy Vance. Also featured on this machine are Hall-of-Fame outfielders Goose Goslin and Chuck Klein, and third baseman Willie Kamm. (The rest of the names have been worn off over the years.) The other baseball machine in the Musee is the same except for the names, and is maybe a year or two older, with Hall-of-Famers Joe Medwick, Luke Appling, Earl Averill, Charlie Gehringer, Bill Terry, and non-HOFer Frank Demaree. Given the time these players were at their prime, I'm guessing both machines are from the early 1930's.

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Guatemala? Rio de Janeiro? Huh?

This journal once chronicled the experience of a low-level American diplomat living in Guatemala. Then he went to Latvia, and Afghanistan, and then back "home" to Washington, DC for a bit. He is now serving in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. If you are one of the few people of no blood relation to the authors who has come here in search of Guatemalan content, here are a few choices from the archives that we like:

In Afghanistan, the photographic opportunities were often limited to what we could sneak with a point-and-shoot camera out the bulletproof window of a speeding SUV. But sometimes we got out and about. A few favorites from that tour:

We've also vacationed aggressively in each region we've been posted in, and taken some epic home leave trips, usually leading to better photos than those where we were posted. Those photos are included in the blog, but somehow holiday snaps seem beneath this sidebar.